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Pets vs Circus Animals
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Pets vs Circus Animals

There’s a problem with the pets vs cattle analogy that’s come into common use around Linux container systems such as Docker. The analogy breaks down as soon as you start thinking about emotionlessly killing off your containers, a key concept that this analogy is meant to explain.

Say what you like about factory farming and slaughterhouses, they serve the market majority's omnivore demand for beef products. The thing is, there is no analogous benefit from killing off a Linux container. It's just gone, leaving no economically useful product behind.

A Better Analogy

I believe part of the reason for the success of this analogy is that the “pets” part is spot-on; we needn’t mess with it.

What do we replace “cattle” with, then? I propose “circus animals.”

Just as with the VMs vs containers dichotomy, humans keep pets and circus animals for overlapping reasons: enjoyment and entertainment. The differences come with how the two classes of animals are kept, the exact purposes to which they’re put, and — key to this article’s point — how their life cycles differ.

Circus animals are…

Each boldfaced word above shows the aptness of this new analogy:

Term Translation
animal, leopard public-facing attraction
audience live customer base
cage container
demand orchestrated microservices
diseases malware
escape sandbox security violation
exotic locale external image repo
feats single-purpose containers
found spawned by the orchestrator
havoc spread malware, exfil secrets
injury security exploit
interchangeable immutable base layer
nameplate public proxied domain name
punter monetizable active visitor
short lifetime ephemeral infrastructure
shot docker container kill
tent server farm
training painstaking image development
veterinarians devops dudes, sysadmins

License

This work is © 2022-2024 by Warren Young and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0